As a PhD in the Holocaust field and a teacher, it was only natural when presented with the opportunity to take this trip that I jumped on it. The previous summer, I traveled with a group of North Carolinian teachers to Poland to visit the concentration camps and other historically significant sights. That trip changed the way in which I teach the Holocaust, as well as how I approach aspects of my research. I left excited for how this trip would transform my understanding of the Holocaust and how those in Germany internalize and process either guilt, generational trauma, or at times perhaps both.
It was not a visit to one of many important museums, the courtroom in Nuremberg, Track 17 (a memorial in Berlin at train tracks where Jews were put onto the trains to be taken to the camps) or even our visit to Dachau, one of the first concentration camps (originally created for political rivals in the early stages of Nazi rule) that I have been continually thinking about on this trip. It was the visit to the former Nazi rally grounds- a location that I had anticipated would be interesting but not particularly emotional or transformative for me.
I have, after all, been to many concentration camps and mass graves. I have dealt with the details of the unspeakable atrocities that happened during the Holocaust on a daily basis. This location was not tied directly to the deaths in the Holocaust, but tied to the Jew-free future that the Nazis were hoping to build. Standing on the grounds I was able to envision a world in which Hitler had been successful in building his “thousand-year Third Reich”. The ruins there lay crumbling and unfinished, but it took very little effort to see the buildings as they had been intended, and Germans marching through the grounds in uniform, smiling and singing patriotic songs.
There was no guarantee of an Allied victory in World War II. This is a point that I feel is often lost in hindsight. I recently had a friendly debate with a colleague about Roosevelt’s claims that they could not do anything about the camps, even late in the war when they had the range and capability to bomb camps and rail lines because it would potentially draw too many resources from the war effort. It was generally agreed amongst the Allied leadership that ending the war was the best way to help the Jews and other victims. Some historians have rebuked this claim, stating that they simply did not care that much about the Jews. Others agree that one serious misstep in the allocations of funds and resources could have proved disastrous for the Allied cause. This illustrates that there were many times when it looked as though the Allies would lose. The Nazi rally grounds stood as a reminder of the world that could very possibly have existed, which would also be a world in which the participants on this trip would not have existed in.
My overall impression of Germany’s relationship to the Holocaust is that they are focused on educating their people on the rise of fascism in hopes of avoiding a return to far-right political ideology. I did not feel as though the focus was truly on the Holocaust and the victims, as I feel visiting Yad Vashem, for instance. Overall, I think Germany has a longer road to travel to fully acknowledging what was done and properly educating their population on the horrors that their ancestors were guilty of increased my uncomfortably standing in front of massive buildings designed to spread the Nazi propaganda to the people.
It was a transformative experience, but not necessarily in the ways that I thought it might be. Participants took away vastly different things from this trip. One person even stated in our final conversation that perhaps the rally grounds were not important enough to be included in the trip. I think this is the mark of a truly well-put-together and thought-out experience. Everyone came with different backgrounds, needs, and expectations, and not a single person in the group felt like the program did not exceed what was promised. The trip was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity put together by fantastic people and I cannot recommend it highly enough.